The Etymology of Old Irish ind-aim

One of the very few additional Irish strong verbal roots in the list in PedersenLewis, Concise comparative Celtic grammar (337-8), which does not appear in the original Verbalverzeichnis of Pedersen's Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen, is Old Irish ind-aim 'washes (hands or feet)'. The meaning and some of the oldest occurrences of this rare and archaic verb have been discussed by Bergin, Eriu 10.112 (1926). Ind-aim is attested in the Monastery of Tallaght, and three times in one of the very old Anecdotes about Mongan, in the form ad-haim. Pedersen-Lewis (loc.cit.) and Thurneysen (OIGr. 454) are doubtless correct in taking adin the latter as a pretonic form of ind-. The 3d sg. form -aim in Old Irish presupposes a primary, thematic verb; from the Old Irish form alone we may reconstruct a proximate verbal base *am-e/o-. The only scholar to have suggested an etymology is Pedersen, who advanced with some hesitation the comparison with Skt. ni-yam'put (the hands) together', on the assumption that Irish ind-aim originally referred only to the washing of the hands. This etymology is unacceptable on several counts. First, the application to washing the feet is just as old (Anecdotes about Mongan) as that to washing the hands. Second, there is no evidence that the -aof Skt. yamgoes back to IE *-a-, not *-e-, and barring very good evidence this is an extremely h Izardous assumption. Third, the earliest attested examples of Skt. yamwith the preverb ni(RV passim) have little to do with an acceptation 'put (the hands) together'; the notion is rather one of 'attaching (something to something)'. And finally, there is in any case no plausible connection, semantic or etymological, between Skt. niand Irish ind-. Etymology is always closely linked to the question of meaning, and that in the largest sense. We may translate ind-aim as 'washes (hands or feet)', but what did this actually mean to the Irish of the 7th and 8th centuries? In what context must we situate this? Old Irish had in fact several verbs, all of which might be rendered by English 'wash', but with specific and restricted spheres of employ, and implying different physical techniques of washing. Compare the following passage from the Rule of Sunday (Cain Domnaig), ed. J. G. O'Keeffe, Eriu 2.200-2 (1905): nd derntar isin domnach ... na folcad, na fothrucud, nd nige 'on Sunday there shall be no ... washing (of the head), nor bathing (of the body), nor washing (of laundry)'. Of these three, folcaid is practically restricted to washing the head; fothrucid implies total submersion in water, hence is applied to 'bathing' in our sense; nigid tends to a more general acceptation, particularly in later Irish, but does admit the specialized senses of washing laundry, ritual ablution, and washing a corpse. Failing a clear and obvious correspondence, as in the case of nigid, we must know exactly the meaning and the precise physical context of such terms, before attempting an etymology. This is precisely the case of ind-aim. Pedersen's etymology clearly shows that

Etymology · Irish · Linguistics · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy

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